. >> obama having some fun with his new pick for treasury secretary, jack lew. let's talk go that and the serious issues he'll deal with on the roundtable joined by begg from the wall. >> caller: al hunt from the bloomberg view, david walker, and paul krugman of "the new york times" and princeton. i'm going to take a stab at trying to explain this trillion dollar platinum coin issued right at the beginning so we can then debate it. it's rooted in 1997 law. you see the law right there that gave the president the ability to -- the mint the ability to do commemorative platinum coins. what they didn't do is set a limit on how much it could be worth so the idea was you get a coin like this, a mock-up right there. deposit it in the federal reserve. say it's worth a trillion dollars and would extend the debt limit for about a year and the government would be able to go on. the white house earlier in the week did not close the door on this and bubbled up through the blogosphere, but, paul krugman, you got everybody's attention on friday when you wrote in "the new york t